The Key to My Domestic Bliss? Not Cooking
Photo by Kendra Howard.
Growing up in a Pakistani household, I never saw a man cook. The kitchen was my mother’s domain, and like many immigrant moms, she made it her lab for blending cultures. She’d swap out traditional ingredients when they were too hard to find in suburban Toronto—like when she made nihari, a rich, meaty stew, and served it with tortillas instead of naan. She’d also tone down the spice to accommodate my younger sister’s developing palate. I watched her and assumed, one day, I’d do the same.
But I didn’t. I developed a fear of handling raw meat as a kid thanks to Eid al-Adha, the Muslim holiday of sacrifice. My family would buy goats or cows weeks in advance, and I’d name them and get attached. The emotional whiplash of feeding an animal one day and seeing it butchered the next stuck with me. Whenever Mom was away, my meals were mostly cheese or scrambled egg sandwiches or leftover chicken nuggets from the night before—also sandwiched. Cooking felt like something I’d eventually have to sort out, especially once I had a family.
Then I met my husband. Fast forward to today, and I haven’t cooked a single meal in years—and I have no regrets. My mother pulls her dupatta a little tighter around herself whenever I brag about my husband’s cooking. She knows that if anyone else were around they might ask: “But why don’t you cook?” The answer is simple: I don’t have to. It has nothing to do with a lack of care or laziness and everything to do with rejecting outdated expectations. My partner and I both work full-time from home and split bills equitably. It only makes sense that our division of household labour reflects our lifestyle.
He handles the cooking, grocery shopping and meal planning. When he’s away, he ensures leftovers are in the fridge. I take care of the dishes, laundry, vacuuming and daily upkeep and organization. Sure, we argue about who does more around the house (me—I do more, and I will die on this hill), but I still think it’s a fair balance because we both play to our strengths.
How did we get here? In classic millennial fashion, it wasn’t a meet-cute or love-at-first-sight story: I met my husband online. I was a 19-year-old arts major commuting to Toronto Metropolitan University. He was studying engineering just up the road at the University of Toronto, living in a chaotic-but-somehow-functioning shared house in Chinatown with roommates I couldn’t keep count of. Most of them cooked, but nothing fancy. (I remember seeing half-scraped egg pans piled up in the sink.) What stood out about my partner was that he enjoyed whipping up meals between classes, while I survived on coffee and street shawarma.
He’d go to the store in the middle of late-night study sessions and buy cookies-and-cream ice cream to fulfill my milkshake cravings.
I was hesitant to eat in a messy kitchen with mismatched cutlery and creaky floors, but the warm smell of his spinach and cheese omelettes drifted to the corners of the house like incense during Ramadan.
My favourite was his mahshi—an Egyptian staple that means “stuffed” in Arabic. Even the best cooks take years to perfect it. The dish consists of different vegetables hollowed out and packed with seasoned short-grain rice, then simmered in a tomato broth. In his version, he stuffed minced meat into colourful, baked peppers. I loved it so much that I threw on the Valencia filter and posted it to Instagram.
On weekends, while I focussed on my master’s degree, he would do meal prep so that we ate well during the week ahead. Then, when I moved overseas for work, he taught me how to make rice over FaceTime. After I returned to Toronto and we were both living with our families in the suburbs, on opposite ends of the city, our dates often involved him driving over an hour to pick me up. His Egyptian mom would send him off with leftovers, like macarona bechamel, packed into a thermos. We’d snack on it during the drive downtown, where we’d stroll museums, attend food festivals or meet friends at parks.
On a recent trip to Pakistan, my husband met my extended family for the first time. One of my aunts was stunned when I casually mentioned that he did the cooking. She gave me a look as if I were some kind of prison-warden wife who wouldn’t let her husband rest after a long, hard day. Then, in her next breath, she told me I was lucky. Her own husband, she said, had never once lifted a finger in the kitchen.
Things are slowly but surely changing. A 2021 StatsCan study shows that men are doing more around the house than ever before. However, in most hetero couples, women are still the ones making dinner—while also doing most of the housework.
Let me be clear: I clean the kitchen after he’s used every pot and pan to make lunch. I put the groceries and dishes away, pack up the leftovers, refill spices and mop the floors. It’s easy to forget that this, too, is kitchen work: women who do the cooking in relationships also often do the invisible labour of cleaning under the guise of “cooking,” whereas men can get away with doing the “cooking” alone.
My husband recently bought under-cabinet lights and a tripod to film himself cooking on TikTok. His latest posts feature creamy shrimp pasta, steak stir-fry, crispy chicken bánh mì and Egyptian staples such as hawawshi (pita stuffed with minced beef) and shorbat adas (lentil soup, also known as daal in South Asia).
I love that my husband loves to cook. And over time, my family has softened their views. These days, my parents look forward to dinner at our place because they know my husband is cooking and they love his food too. They understand that marriage isn’t about ticking traditional checkboxes—it’s about figuring out what works for you. And in our home, that means he cooks, I clean and we both eat well.
